Npm and bower installing only end user / production files

Lately I've been wondering if there is a way to use chat or npm just as a consumer. Let's say I'm not very interested in developing the package further, but I'm just using it in my website / application.

So, I would first think:

npm install jquery

      

        
        
        
      

    

I tried with a flag --production

but the same structure was loaded.

However, this brings me a huge tree of files and the only thing I need is a jquery/dist/jquery.min.js

.

The same goes for bower:

bower install jquery

      

        
        
        
      

    

Again, an expensive list of files including a folder src

with a lot of dev-only related files.

I apologize if I am mistakenly assuming the behavior of package managers here, but it would be interesting to know how to use these package managers as a simple end user, not a developer, to update my project dependencies.

At the moment I feel like this is too much for what I need and that just copying jquery.min.js

into my project folder src

would be much easier / simpler.

If the concept of both npm and bower is different and someone can point it out, that would be appreciated, as well as any advice for an alternative package manager that only import core production files.